Tony Award nominations to be announced Oct. 15
NEW YORK (AP) — Nominations for this year’s Tony Awards have been set for Oct. 15, pitting 18 eligible shows in competition for 26 competitive categories in a coronavirus-shortened season.
James Monroe Iglehart will announce the nominations on the Tony Awards’ YouTube Channel at noon ET. No date was announced for the actual awards. The Tony Awards Nominating Committee will meet Tuesday to vote on this year’s nominations.
The official eligibility cutoff date was Feb. 19 for all Broadway productions opening in the 2019-2020 season. That left the following productions eligible for 2020 Tony Award nominations:
“Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” “Sea Wall/A Life,” Betrayal,” “The Height of the Storm,” “The Great Society, “Slave Play,” “Linda Vista,” “The Rose Tattoo,” The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical,” “The Sound Inside,” “Tina – The Tina Turner Musical,” “The Inheritance,” “A Christmas Carol,” “Jagged Little Pill,” “My Name is Lucy Barton,” “A Soldier’s Play” and “Grand Horizons.”
Broadway theaters abruptly closed on March 12, knocking out all shows — including 16 that were still scheduled to open. Producers, citing health and city authorities, have three times extended the Broadway shutdown, currently until at least early January.
Some spring shows — like a musical about Michael Jackson and a revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite” starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker — pushed their production to next year. But others abandoned their plans, including “Hangmen” and a revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
The coronavirus pandemic also led to the shutdown of television and film production though some work has resumed.
Norway’s aging king to undergo operation
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Norway’s 83-year-old King Harald V was admitted to the main hospital in Oslo Thursday to undergo an operation to replace a heart valve, the palace said.
“This intervention is necessary to improve the king’s breathing. This type of operation is performed several hundred times a year at Rikshospitalet,” the monarch’s doctor, Bjoern Bendz, said in a palace statement.
The king was hospitalized last month with breathing difficulties. Doctors ruled out COVID-19.
The royal household in Oslo said the monarch is on sick leave until further notice and that his son and heir to the throne, Crown Prince Haakon, has stepped in and taken over his father’s duties.
The palace said the operation will not be open heart surgery. The king will be awake, and the operation will be performed via the groin with local anesthesia. It is scheduled for today at the hospital’s Cardiovascular and Lung Clinic.
In 2005, the king’s aortic valve was replaced by an artificial heart valve. Such valves have a lifespan of between 10 and 15 years, the royal household said, adding it was “not uncommon” for such interventions to have to be repeated.
Harald ascended the throne upon the death of his father, King Olav, on Jan. 17, 1991.
The country’s first native-born king since the 14th century, he married a commoner as a prince and won hearts in his egalitarian country by leading the mourning in 2011 for the victims of mass killer Anders Behring Breivik.
